


The Sunday V8 Club (straight-A shooting)

by threesmallcrows



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Cults, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-02
Updated: 2015-06-07
Packaged: 2018-04-02 11:28:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4058320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threesmallcrows/pseuds/threesmallcrows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four units of advanced engineering for robotics, one group and three crazies. Can't be that bad.</p><p>Featuring Nux as the second-time death cult enthusiast, Max as the infamous questionably-sane genius who lives out of a car in the staff parking lot, and Furiosa as, like, possibly a refugee of a civil war, or maybe an undercover FBI agent or something, shit, Nux doesn't know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Immortan Joe’s outfit wasn’t the first death cult I’d been in.

 

I think that’s probably not that common. For obvious reasons. For the first couple weeks the War Boys kept trying to be hush-hush about it. I was like, “Come on, guys! It’s a death cult—I know what I’ve got myself into. You can stop now.” I think _I_ actually made them uncomfortable, which is pretty funny, if you think about it.

 

The first outfit I got into in high school, maybe sophomore year or something like that. World ending, judgment day, the whole she-bang. It was all pretty legit. Anyway, the day the world was supposed to end, all of us locked ourselves in Panny’s parent’s big summer mansion. We turned off the lights and lit a bunch of candles and turned the gas up real high and waited, but nothing really happened. Eventually I think someone Googled monoxide poisoning and found out it’d take too long. The whole point was to die before world’s end, so everyone was in a bit of a panic for a few minutes after that. Luckily the leader had back-up cyanide. It wasn’t until I woke up in the hospital after vomiting for about 8 hours that I realized why he hadn’t wanted to use it in the first place. Turns out he’d bought it cheap off some knock-off Amazon website, like a Chinese version or something? Anyway, it wasn’t the real deal—obviously, you know that, since I’m sitting here telling you this.

 

The main thing I remember from that day was that someone, I don’t know who, had brought like one of those fat Yankee candles to the Risening. So the whole time we were waiting to die it smelled more and more of cinnamon and Christmas pine needles. No one said anything, but I could tell the leader was ticked off. We were going to ascend reeking of the fucking holiday season. I mean, come on. Nobody wants that.

 

So looking back on it I’m kind of glad I didn’t die. You can botch a lot of stuff up in life, but death?

                           

Death should be flawless.

 

()

 

So yeah, anyway, like I was saying, right after I got to campus I found the War Boys. Fit right in like a glove. I was kind of a veteran, you know, so they didn’t have to explain everything to me like the other bone-headed newbies.

 

I never actually saw the Immortan in the beginning. I figured he wasn’t a college student. That was fine by me. A lot of college kids are super flaky, and I didn’t want another knockoff-cynanide/Yankee clusterfuck. The campus leader was a guy who called himself Slit. He seemed like a pretty responsible dude. He ran shit tight. The guy looked ex-military, practically. He had guns the size of my head.

 

Some of the newbies balked at the powder and the makeup. I was part of the camp that loved it. So fucking cool. Like actual walking death’s-heads, yeah?

 

Two weeks into school and I was walking around full-powdered every day, with the grease paint that football players use all over my eyes. Awesome, fucking awesome. It was cold as shit on campus but I wore my jacket open and no shirt underneath because I liked looking down and seeing that long chalky stripe of skinny chest and belly, the paint flaking all over my clothes. Plus it showed off my tattoo really nice.

 

I liked the look a lot, but I get that it wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. So when the professor told us we had to partner up in advanced robotics engineering, I was kind of expecting to get the weird ones.

 

But Jesus, did I get the weird ones.

 

Not even just one. Two. We were supposed to do partners, but there was an odd number of people, and the three of us made the odd group out.

 

The chick, right? Her name: _Furiosa._ I mean, did her parents name her after a racecar, or what? What the hell kind of name was that?

 

She looked ethnic. Tan-like. Really fit, shaved head, eyebrows like crowbars and a mouth that looked like it’d rip a smile at the seams if it tried to wear one. She was kind of pretty, but you really had to dig for it behind all the vicious. I was scared shitless of her, and not ashamed to admit it.

 

And then there was Max Rockatansky, aka Mad Max. The guy was legit insane. Trying to get a few words out of him was like trying to separate two stacked 2-by-1 Legos with fingernails you’d just cut. A conversation was out of the question. Most of the time he just grunted and twitched anytime anyone moved too fast. He looked too old to be an undergraduate, but maybe that was just the unkempt facial hair and the homeless-person clothes he wore. At least he didn’t smell too much.

 

Within five minutes, things were already going swimmingly, and by swimmingly I mean crap.

 

“I’m Nux. What’s your name?”

 

“Furiosa.”

 

A grumble.

 

“Ah.” Sideways glance at the guy who I didn't know was called Max yet. He was kneading his fingers hard and looking intently at his desk. His nose was about half a sneeze away from a grey lump of dried gum caked to the lab table.

 

I retracted my hand when Furiosa didn’t uncross her arms. “That’s a cool name.”

 

No response.

 

“What does it mean?” I tried.

 

“It doesn’t mean anything,” she said slowly. Two rows in front of us someone stood up quickly, their chair scraping over the floor. Max jumped about two inches before folding further into himself.

 

“Oh. Uh, nice…? What, uh, what about you, man?”

 

Muh-mmmbl-gmmbl-something.

 

“What? Sorry, I didn’t catch that?”

 

Gentle rocking now. A low stream of mutters.

 

Awesome.

 

“It’s not October yet.”

 

I whipped back around from my puzzled inspection of the back of the guy’s neck (dirty, scarred). “Sorry?”

 

Furiosa gestured at her face.

 

“Huh?”

 

She sighed, a small whistle that cut like a bandsaw. “Halloween.”

 

“Uh… oh! Oh, haha, yeah, dude. Nah, I know it’s not Halloween.”

 

She squinted slightly at me. I felt myself begin to sweat.

 

“So…” I said, looking for a next topic of conversation. Everyone else in the small class was chattering away happily to their partner. My damp fingers had begun to leave white marks on the desk.

 

“We should exchange contact information,” said Furiosa. I couldn’t help glancing at Max, who showed no sign of having heard anything. I was beginning to sense a pattern.

 

“Yeah! Yes, we should.” I pulled out my phone (white smudges on the screen), wiping it hastily on my jeans. “Just put your nu—”

 

“I don’t have a phone.”

 

“…what?”

 

It was the twenty-fucking-first century. Who didn’t have a phone? I mean, shit, I was gunning to kill myself in six months time and still I had a shit iPhone 4, didn’t I?

 

“No. Phone.”

 

“That’s fine, we can, uh, we can do Faceb—”

 

“No,” she said. She didn’t have to clarify.

 

“Email,” I shot back. She had to have an email. The school fucking assigned you one. Hold on, did this chick know what email was? For Christ’s sake, we had to do programming in this class.

 

After a second, she swiped my phone out of my hands and typed something in.

 

“Thanks. Great. Muh, uh, whatever your name is, if y—”

 

The big clock tower struck 2. Semi-Homeless leapt from his seat like someone had electrified it and scurried out the door. He didn’t have a backpack.

 

“Oh—kay.”

 

On my other side, Furiosa was packing up.

 

“Look him up in the directory,” she ordered.

 

“Which dir-, where is… that?”

 

She was gone. I looked at my phone.

 

Her email was [fury@citadel.edu](mailto:fury@citadel.edu).

 

Great. Really great.

 

()

 

His name was Max Rockatansky, and the directory was no fucking help at all.

 

But everybody knew Max. Or at least, my roommate did. All I’d had to do was mention a weird, probably crazy homeless-looking guy I'd met and he’d laughed.

 

“So you’ve met Mad Max.”

 

“Shit. Well, that’s a good name.”

 

“It’s good ‘cause it’s true. The guy’s lost all his screws.”

 

“How is he in college?”

 

“I dunno. Probably goes to mandated counseling and pops pills or some shit. How’d you meet him?”

 

“Same class.”

 

“Engineering?”

 

“Yeah, actually.”

 

“I heard he’s good at that shit.”

 

“Oh yeah?”

 

“Yeah,” he said. “Supposedly he’s like a genius or something.”

 

Then he put his headphones on, and that was the end of that.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Half an hour into our first group meeting, I’d managed to liberally smear the entire keyboard with a powdery coating of white. Unfortunately, this involved a lot less programming than you’d probably assume and I would’ve liked. Most of it had come from furtive Google searches and nervous sweat.

 

In other words, I still didn’t have a clue how to approach any of our homework problems. To be clear, this was a one-hour meeting. And I wasn’t exactly counting on either of my partners to stick around for much longer after that.

 

I risked a glance away from my screen. To my left, Furiosa was alternating between scanning lines of the assignment spec with the intensity of a laser cutter and typing in rapid bursts that set the ancient keyboard clacking like machine-gun fire. The alleged genius pecked away occasionally with two or three fingers, as if each key was a lit coal he was being forced to touch. I had no fucking clue whether either of them was making more progress than me. I’d bet on Furiosa being nearly done. Max, as always, was a twitchy mystery.

 

We’d split up the—hang on, why we were in the library first. Neither me nor Max had laptops, first of all. And it turned out that Rockatansky, big surprise, had managed to misplace his student ID already; hence no lab access, not even school library access. The dingy public library it was.

 

So there we were, parked in the middle of a sort of computer retirement home. Every machine there was a war-torn pre-dot-com-boom-era veteran. PTSD in the form of frequent crashes and lag like rush-hour traffic.

 

I smiled a little, thinking about it. Furiosa glanced at me. I stopped smiling.

 

A kid sagged around the corner, backwards baseball-cap and pants low enough to pass for the early 00’s, and parked his barely-pubescent ass on Furiosa’s port side. The guy was either blind and deaf or had bowling balls hanging down there. I saw Max tracking him out of the corner of his eye, and tried for an exchange of looks, like _did you see that? Furiosa’s gonna use his femur as a toothpick._ Max just stared warily back at me before hunching back over his screen. I stifled a sigh and glanced at the clock at the right of the taskbar. Twenty-five minutes to go. A group of mid-teen boys clomped by, throwing eyebrow quirks and ill-muffled whispers in Max’s direction.

 

I read the instructions for the sixtieth time. _Taking your result from Part 3, implement the Q-learning algorithm. Find a discount factor that causes the agent to exit the maze._ Surreptitiously, I opened a Wikipedia tab on Q-learning and began scanning it while smiling widely, as if to say _everything’s okay! I got this, guys._

A gangly teenager whose face was more generously studded with pimples than the measly local meat-lover’s pizza special was with sausage came over and hovered a good ten feet away.

                                                                                                 

“Sir,” he lisped.

 

We all ignored him and his spray of spit. Clearly, no one here qualified as a sir.

 

He came a few steps forward, putting his arms up as if we were zoo animals that needed fending off.

 

“Sir,” he repeated.

 

Neither Furiosa nor Max were cracking. Defeated, I looked up.

 

“… yeah?”

 

My blackened eye sockets didn’t seem to phase him. Maybe more shit went down in the library than I’d given him credit for.

 

“No, you’re fine. _Sir._ ”

 

In the long moment it took me to bridge _sir_ and _Rockatansky_ with the explanation _he thinks he’s a hobo,_ a series of very quick events occurred.

 

“Oh, no, he’s with—”

 

The library worker moved another few steps forward and put his hand on Max’s shoulder, presumably to shake him. Max’s head snapped up. Fast. Then he jumped the dude.

 

He went down hard. I thought I heard something snap.. I was on my feet without realizing it, almost tripping on the low crossbar of my chair. Max’s hit the the floor with a clang. Frozen, I watched his arm and his balled fist arc up, and, down.

 

It only got to land once in a gloriously wet, blunt noise, before Furiosa blasted past me and threw herself on Max’s shoulders. The two of them rolled off, grappling with each other, leaving me a clear view of the red spurting from Pimple Face’s newly busted nose. He screamed like a chicken getting plucked before choking on the blood gushing into his mouth.

 

“Holy—shit,” I breathed.

 

Furiosa wrestled Max onto his stomach. She had her knee in his back and an arm around his throat, pulling his head back.

 

“ _Get it together,_ ” I heard her hiss.

 

I just started laughing. Because what the _hell_? This was supposed to be a group work session, not a World Star video. And in a fucking library. Sagging-kid was still in the corner, pressed up against the wall, catching flies and looking fit to piss his patterned boxers. I looked at him and howled in laughter as he shrank back farther.

 

That’s how they found us, the lone obese library security guard and the wizened head librarian. Two World Star video actors, a bleeding victim, and a hooting skull, clutching at his V8-chest for air.

 

After a little hasty relocation and a couple of wheezy, strongly-worded warnings to stay away, our meeting continued leisurely in the parking lot. Old farts stared at Max’s bloody knuckles before ducking into the security of their minivans and sedans. Children looked at us like we were going to eat them.

 

I smiled for the crowd, toothily, chuckles still draining. Didn’t even finish out the hour. What a clusterfuck. I was feeling fine, though, internals thrumming hot and ready to run. “Good one,” I said to Max. His eye flashed up to meet mine before skidding back down to investigate a particularly wide crack in the asphalt.

 

As we stood there in silence, cars swerving widely around us, I figured I was beginning to like these people.


End file.
